Ada Limón, Startlement and Line Breaks

'What we need right now is tenderness,' former poet laureate Ada Limón says in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air. Limón's work documents everything from kingfisher birds to the cosmos itself. "I'm embracing my strangeness," she says of her poetry. 

Her new collection is Startlement, and she read the title poem. Here is the transcript version and it has no line breaks. I suggest you read the transcript version and think about where the lines would or should break. Does it need line breaks? Okay, there is punctuation here, but are they the ends of lines? Is it that simple? And what about stanzas? All one stanza or multiple? Then, listen to the interview. Can you hear line breaks?

"Startlement. It is a forgotten pleasure. The pleasure of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard skittering off his sunspot rock, the flicker of an unknown bird by the bus stop. To think, perhaps we are not distinguishable, and therefore, no loneliness can exist here. Species to species in the same blue air, smoke, wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming, so many unknown languages to think we have only honored this strange human tongue. If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination of all things upstream. We know now we were never at the circle's center. Instead, all around us, something is living or trying to live. The world says what we are becoming, we are becoming together. The world says one type of dream has ended, and another has just begun. The world says once we were separate, and now we must move in unison."

I like thinking about line breaks when I write poems. I have that right. I don't have the right to change another poet's line breaks (or no breaks), but I like to think about them.

No cheating - but you can see the poem here

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Prompt: Line Breaks

I was reading an anthology of short poems and was paying attention not only to their brevity but to their line breaks.

In Rae Armantrout’s poem “Unbidden," her use of short lines in conjunction with enjambment contribute to a sense of disjointedness.

The ghosts swarm
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone

Line breaks are one of the main things that separate prose and poetry. They give poems their slim who-cares-about-margins appearance.(We will pass on talking about prose poems for the moment.)

Enjambment is where the poet deliberately breaks a sentence across multiple lines before its natural finishing point. End-stops are the opposite of enjambed lines in that an end-stopped line contains complete thoughts, phrases, or sentences.You can usually tell a poetic line is end-stopped if there is punctuation at the end. The punctuation could be internal (e.g. comma, semi-colon, colon, em dashes), or external (e.g. period, exclamation mark, question mark).These lines give the reader logical moments to pause at the line break. It is used in many traditional poems and it supports poetic forms using rhyme and meter.

William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a modernist poem orriginally published without a title. It was designated "XXII" in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection that incorporated alternating selections of free verse and prose

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Notice that to maintain his very short, two-line stanzas Williams breaks two words that could be together - wheelbarrow and rainwater.

Line breaks create white space in the text and are one way that poets can exercise a greater degree of control over the speed and rhythm that you read. It is unlike our everyday language and unlike prose literature.

Personally, I find it annoying when poems have breaks that seem to be used simply to keep line lengths the same - almost like a margin. It is possible a poet will do that in order to create a shape for the poem. There are good reasons to break a line. There is no rule book but consideration should be given to the first and last words: Avoid having weak words at the beginning or end of lines. For example, action verbs and nouns tend to be strong.

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost has strong end words: fire, ice, desire,twice, hate, great, suffice. (Although I find that breaking a line on "ice" - "To say that for destruction ice / Is also great" - seems more in service of the rhyme than the line break. Sorry, Robert).

"Dreams" by Langston Hughes is a good example of end-stopped lines that each contain a complete thoughts, phrases or sentences.

Our two model poems by two very different poets are both 9 lines / 8 line breaks. This month's call for submissions is for a 9-line poem on any topic of your choosing. Stanza breaks are another consideration - one stanza, 4X2, 3X3 or any combination. The key here is for you (and the editors) to pay special attention this month to line breaks. Whether enjambed or end-stopped, each of your 8 breaks should be logical and pushing us to read in a particular way with a particular attention. Sounds easy. It is not.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org